Older People’s Champion
To introduce myself, I’m Irene Kohler, a founding trustee of Silver Salisbury and Chair of the Board of Trustees. In 2016, based on my professional experience of supporting older people in adult education and subsequently in a small charity, I was invited to be Salisbury Area Board’s Older People’s Champion. At that time, I hadn’t long been living in Salisbury, so I set about finding out what facilities and activities were available for older people. I found three U3A’s (University of the Third Age) with lots of groups, and a folder in the library advertising a range of voluntary groups; but I found information about everything was haphazard. As Older People’s Champion, I felt it would help older people to find and join groups if the information was all together. In the autumn of 2018, we had some events celebrating International Older People’s Day which is 1 October and our first annual directory.
Each year since then (apart from 2020) we have had an autumn festival of events and an ever-increasing annual directory of groups, clubs and activities which are reasonably priced, have reasonable access, and welcome older people. We have also spread beyond the Salisbury boundary into Wilton, Southern Wiltshire, Amesbury and surrounding villages. We are very grateful to the local libraries, Five Rivers Leisure Centre, the Information Centre Shopmobility and various community venues, for their help in promoting our publications.
Over the past couple of years we have developed coffee mornings with occasional speakers in Wilton and Salisbury libraries, Old Sarum Community Centre and Laverstock and Ford Village Hall. These include a Bangladeshi and a Ukrainian group: it’s very important to us that older people from all communities are welcome at Silver Salisbury.
After the festival is our quiet time, but behind the scenes we’re busy fundraising to meet the ever-increasing costs of our spring newsletter, the annual directory and our autumn festival: no mean task as the number of people catered for and our costs rise year on year. We are also starting to plan our programmes for the year and in 2026 we aim to be including another Bangladeshi open evening, an intergenerational project including primary age children, and some fundraising events.